Consider Hostages Casualties Of War And Abandon Them

PARIS — There is, in the long term, nothing really to do about the hostages in Lebanon except abandon them. If their rescue is impossible, and until now it has always been judged impossible, they are better considered casualties of political warfare in the Middle East.

Blackmail may be paid. Diplomatic interventions may prolong the negotiation of blackmail`s price, which is what seems to have happened in the case of Joseph Cicippio, of the University of Beirut. To be realistic, though, it is necessary that we practice what military surgeons call triage. We must concentrate on what really is possible and abandon cases that are hopeless.

When Israel, or anyone else, kidnaps still other people to try to exchange them for hostages already held, or when one pays ransom, as France and West Germany have done, or tries to trade arms for hostages and bargains to pay ransom, as the United States has done, one conforms to the plan of the hostage-taker. One is doing what one is supposed to do. The policy of hostage- taking is thus validated, which guarantees that still more hostages will be taken.

Lt. Col. William R. Higgins of the U.S. Marine Corps, and his fellow hostages, are innocents cut down in the cross-fire of Middle Eastern politico- military conflict. But the Middle East during the last 40 years has seen tens of thousands of murdered innocents.

The shelling that has been going on every night in Beirut in recent weeks has been a murder of innocents. You cannot conduct a war, as Syria, its Lebanese Islamic and Druze allies, and the Maronite forces under Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun have been doing since March, in the midst of a civilian population, without the murder of innocents, deliberately accepted.

When Israel`s air force attacks what the Israeli authorities identify as terrorist bases in Lebanon, as regularly happens, it must be taken for granted that innocents-people who have nothing to do with terrorism-will prove, in the detached military expression, ``collateral`` victims. Too bad for them. The Palestinians who bomb synagogues and have attacked Jewish and Israeli institutions abroad, and have bombed and hijacked aircraft of several nations, say too bad for the innocent.

When the USS New Jersey fired on Syrian positions in Lebanon in 1983 there were serious numbers of civilian casualties, a matter of target mis-identification. Too bad. When the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner on a scheduled flight over the Gulf in 1987, 290 innocents died. A regrettable error. Innocents were killed by scores in the Paris bombings in 1986, by intention. If the United States conducts military retaliation for the events of the last few days, attacking this or that

``terrorist target`` in Lebanon, there undoubtedly, inevitably, will be still more innocents murdered. What, then, is special about the hostages?

I do not say this to shock or to be cold-blooded about affairs of deep consequence for individuals. I am attempting to be serious about a matter likely, if we continue on our present course, to produce still more human tragedies. Taking hostages works because the Western governments, and press, have made it work. It is time to stop.

Ours has been a foolish and shortsighted policy, contrary to the general interest of the hostages themselves, and of those vulnerable to being taken hostage in the future. It has enhanced the hostages` value to those who hold them, and condemned others to be taken as new hostages so as to replenish the stock of prisoners for whom the Western powers so profitably pay, in cash, kind or political concessions.

It must be understood that this now has become a matter of cash ransoms. The price of the hostages released up to now is put, by correspondents on the scene, at an average level of $1 million each.

Israel too makes deals, one must note. Despite its intransigent rhetoric, Israel has repeatedly entered into exchanges for Israeli prisoners held in Lebanon. Israel kidnaped the Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid in July to set up such an exchange.

Col. Higgins was a professional soldier on an assignment he understood to entail precisely this risk of kidnap and death. He paid with his life for a duty freely undertaken. That, in Alfred de Vigny`s magnificent phrase, makes up ``the grandeur and the servitude`` of the military vocation.

Of the other American hostages, Terry Anderson is a journalist. Like a great many other journalists, he accepted the risk of working in Lebanon, in the service of civilized society`s interest in the truth about the world around them. The other Americans, with the exception of Edward Austin Tracy, a book salesman, are educators, or connected with institutions of international education in Beirut-Joseph Cicippio, Thomas Sutherland, Frank Reed, Jesse Turner, Alann Steen, Robert Polhill. They stayed in Lebanon despite its clear dangers out of their sense of professional or family obligations, in awareness of the risk.

They were imprudent, but magnificently so. The grief of those close to them must grieve us. But there is no way to help them which does not perpetuate the suffering of all the hostages by enhancing their value to their captors and make more likely the victimization of still others. The only policy that makes sense is triage. The hostages must be treated as lost-as if, like Col. Higgins, they are already dead. R.I.P.